Language

Language variants

The word language contains a multiplicity of different designations. Two senses have already been distinguished: language as a universal species-specific capability of the human race and languages as the various manifestations of that capability, as with English, French, Latin, Swahili, Malay, and so on. There is, of course, no observable universal language over and above the various languages that have been or are spoken or written, but one may choose to concentrate on the general and even the universal features, characteristics, and components of different languages and on the ways in which the same sets of descriptive procedures ... (100 of 26,845 words)